tmp2fandomcom-20200214-history
GreenStar Education
GreenStar Education would be the educational arm of the GreenStar Community Cooperative and it would have its origins in the Foundation Open Courseware Network project. As an advanced society that believes it is the essential purpose of civilization to seek the maximum potential of all people, the communities of TMP would cultivate a culture that fosters a pursuit of life-long education and ultimately seeks to realize a very lofty goal –universal free access to education for all residents of TMP communities and ultimately the whole of human civilization. This, of course, will not be possible initially, or perhaps for some time. The first TMP communities will be small in population and likely rely on both ‘home schooling’ and the educational infrastructures of nations they reside in –primitive as these generally are throughout most of the world today. But as the collective community of TMP settlements grows and their individual populations increase they will have more resources to invest in their own independent educational system –and a practical reason for doing so since it effects the attractiveness of these settlements to families and resident productivity. Aiding this is the trend toward the development of courseware; computer software combining the content of textbooks with the interactivity of a student-teacher relationship and the intelligence to perform testing and evaluation of acquired knowledge. Though likely to have most of its impact for late teen through adult education, this technology offers the prospect of radically reducing the need for primitive Industrial Age strategies of mass production education in prison-like institutional settings, allowing communities to do far more with far less in a much more psychologically and physically healthy environment. But as with medical care in TMP, where professional educators cannot be eliminated –particularly for the education of younger students– they will be required to have a much higher level of knowledge, sophistication, and productivity than typical with our over-specialized and poorly trained educators of the present. Likewise, the facilities employed for education will need to leverage the capabilities of these people as much as possible through sophisticated design and technology, since educators of such caliber will always be rare. TMP communities will tend to be tight-knit socially and architecturally and it is likely that to economize on cost and space the personal residence will have to integrate into the school environment in such a way as to preclude the need for the mass student warehousing common to contemporary schools, likely relying on tools of telepresence such as virtual window-wall systems and the assistance of parents in supervising their children’s study habits. School will follow children around virtually, rather than being a place they all are shipped-off to and packed in like cattle on a daily basis. Physical classrooms will tend to be more theater, lounge, or museum-like and used primarily where demonstrations and physical activities cannot translate through telepresence. Traditional culture in western education has favored a notion of ‘professional distance’ which has generally put teacher and parent at odds with one other. Most teachers –for all the lip-service they publicly give to parent involvement– actually consider them more of a hindrance to the smooth running of the ‘factory’ of the classroom while parents tend to regard teachers as civil servants who care little about their children and need to constantly be reminded who pays their salary in order to compel fairness and consideration out of tem. These attitudes will need to change in the environment of TMP communities. Teachers will need to have a much greater knowledge of psychology and teaching theory than ever before in order to cope with a classroom that exists more like a cloud in network space than a physical place where students can be rigidly controlled. Meanwhile parents will have to come to see teachers as necessary members of the family structure and take more personal responsibility for their childrens’ study behavior. None of this will be easy but to provide a very high standard of education in remote places as in space it is crucial. Parent Topic *GreenStar Community Cooperative Peer Topics *GreenStar Cultural *GreenStar Medical *GreenStar Relief *GreenStar Security Phases Category:GreenStar Community Cooperative